• On Black History Month: “Michelle celebrates the full month. I celebrate half.”

• “My mother loved a black man,” but “she was not a Kardashian.”

Ooooohhhh! That’s some quality stuff right there!

– Speaking of “offensive” stuff not actually being all that offensive, I think Anthony Weiner’s resignation is terrible precedent. The dude’s obviously a sleazeball, and his wife may very well be pissed (though even on that point, we don’t know the details of their marriage and can’t really assume anything, anyway), but as far as I can tell, he broke no laws and didn’t even have sex with anyone. Or, like Hertzberg writes,

In the caddishness category, consider what Congressman Weiner did not do:

• Commit adultery
• Fornicate
• Hook up
• Patronize prostitutes
• Seduce an intern
• Seduce a congressional page
• Get divorced
• Get divorced serially
• Get divorced with children at vulnerable ages
• Hypocritically embrace prudish “family values”
• Advocate “abstinence”
• Lie about sex under oath
• Demonize his own sexual orientation
• Demand that some other politician resign because of some sexual misbehavior
• Break up somebody else’s marriage
• Make an assistant take the fall for getting a mistress pregnant
• Fly to South America to see a mistress on Father’s Day while leaving wifey home with the kids
• Pay off a mistress or a mistress’s husband
• Have a mistress
• Break a law

As far as sex scandals go, this is about as tame as they come. Meanwhile, repeated prostitute customer David Vitter continues to serve as Senator from Louisiana. Maybe it really is ok if you’re a Republican.

– Lastly, it has become obvious to me that my favorite writer right now is David Grann, a long-form journalist whose works mostly appear in the New Yorker. You might already be familiar with some of them, even if you don’t know who he is. If you’ve got the time to spare, and want a nice long-form article to sink your teeth into, consider the following:

– Trial by Fire, about Cameron Todd Willingham, a man executed in Texas for an arson he quite likely did not commit.

– The Chameleon, about a serial French impersonator who ends up posing as a Texan boy gone missing. And the family accepts him in! The sinister element is that – because he is not the Texan boy… what actually happened to the kid?

– A Murder Foretold, an in depth look at one of the greatest political conspiracies in modern history. It occurs in Guatemala, and I will say no more, other than it reads like fiction yet is entirely true.